Someone at work has just got solar panels, he's telling everybody how good they are.. He paid £7000 for them. He tells me he can save £300 a year on average on electric bills? So that makes it 23 years until he breaks even.. Then I read you need to get them cleaned twice a year at a cost of £100 plus a clean plus a service once a year at £200. Then will they last 23 years? Is it the same as the world's richest man telling you, you need to buy a Tesla? A woman down our street just bought an electric car to save money? She told me she paid £40 k for it. She goes to local shops and work which is a mile away and does 20 -30 miles a week in it. So around a fiver in petrol if she kept her petrol car.. so thats £260 a year petrol money she will save, never mind the electric she uses to charge the car..so 153 years until the savings pay for the £40k car..Ten years time the battery is knackered? Car is worth sod all..Are people that gullible? Last rant...the bloke who owns Louis Vuitton also very rich. I don't think he's made his money by the volume of bags he's sold..more on the inflated prices. I would have a second thought that maybe the bags are worth sod all if he's making that much money and look else where. Off to bed
What will a "service" do? Cleaning - twice a year? Why? A decent hose down occasionally but not much more. On mine - saving around about £1000-1200 per year. Even the past few weeks it has been around £3-4/day.
Payback period obviously depends on the cost of the import displaced, but likely 6-10 years in most cases then the same life again thereafter.
Surely if the panels are dirty less electricity they generate? A quick hose down on a two story house?
I read with green technology advancing all present panels will be dinosaur technology and obsolete in 5 years time
Mine have been in for 15 months and generation is much the same as last year - yes there will be some slight degradartion over time, but the need to clean twice every year?
Round here the window cleaner does solar panels with a massive telescopic pole thing, same price as windows I believe, £100 sounds a bit of an exaggeration.
With the FIT being so small and the need for 'qualified registered' installers pushing up the initial cost, solar panels are not currently worth the trouble.
Solar panels are an investment on a house you don't plan on leaving for many many years. They are best combined with a simple battery setup to cover you in the early morning + evening. Go for a system that is expandable. If anything it is worth getting a hybrid inverter just with batteries and use a split tariff to fill them up when cheap. This way you can take all the equipment with you when you move. Then consider panels at a later date. An electric car is just not at a price point [yet] for it to be justified until there is a step change in the offering; maybe the Dacia Spring if the hype = reality, but for now I'm sticking with petrol.
The Hype does not equal reality, electric cars have some way to go yet before they are ready for market, we just brought a new petrol C3 after taking a good close look at electric, didn't like what I found out about range, battery service life and fires in the battery.
I don't think you can generalise with new technologies, not that they are but the uses and ways they are being integrated with other technologies is rapidly changing, solar, air source, etc, all work perfectly well and save a fortune when, like everything else, they are designed and fitted properly into the right buildings, equally when badly designed and fitted into less than ideal buildings they don't work properly. In my experience the biggest problem in the UK is not the technology, it's the lack of understanding of how new systems work in both contractors and home owners, I have seen solar and heat pump installations that work beyond anything gas can offer, it is not hard to achieve but the efficiency of the building will always be the limiting factor for any heating system, I think it's more useful to consider that it's not the technology that doesn't work, it works, it's the building that needs to be right.
Solar panels often come as a package, so you get battery storage and UPS for selected items, reduced electric bills part due to solar production part due to using off peak electric, and money for exporting to grid. Again often a package, so if you import from same firm as you export you can get a higher rate, having said that applied in late January, told the PDF forms they supplied in wrong format, so they would post them to me, told it will be back dated, or I would select another firm, but still waiting, so not sure if I will get paid for export. Winter as one would expect not much solar, so we are just now getting enough solar so the battery takes me to midnight so cheap rate, and charged until 5 am they last well until sun is generating, so except for shower not used over the 5 kWh at 8:95p per kWh used to recharge the batteries. So with standing charge around £1:04 per day, at this time of year. As to old bill it was around £115 per month, so around £3:80 per day, but this is at this time of year, there were days in the winter where the only saving was due to tariff change, so battery. So (29.57p x 3.2)-(3.2 x 8.95p) = 66p a day saving with battery, nothing to do with solar, but since the day rate went up to 31.31p and the standing charge went down, it is very hard to calculate. For those on a variable rate near impossible. It is all well and good quoting Octopus rates, but one would need to stand in ones mini power station deciding when to do the washing, etc. and Wednesday I exported 19.5 kWh but yesterday down to 6.5 kWh, today as I write 2.4 kWh exported, but still waiting to see this money. So is it worth it? depends on the value one puts on the bits which come as part of the package, I can take the board away from the grate and light a fire, I have a small stock of wood, so could go for a few weeks, but do I want the dust from a open fire? Do I want to carry wood into the house, with the spiders that are bound to come with it. With my solar panels I have go an UPS which will run my freezers and central heating, as for how long depends on the sun, and time of day when we loose power. Also if summer or winter. I remember the Winter of Discontent and how cold it was in a hot air centrally heated house gas fired which would not run without electric. The labour party showed us how we can't rely on electric power from the grid. So anyone with no chimney so they can't light a wood, coal, or any other fire, and rely on electric to run the heating even if the heating is oil or gas, wants some method to continue to get power to run the boiler if grid power fails. One could buy a generator, or have a caravan in back garden, but some how some way we need heating in the home, we can use electric without gas or oil, but using gas or oil without electric is a real problem. Can't say it will never happen, it has happened in 1978-9, the moving finger writes, etc.
We paid £3.5k for a 4kw array on the old FIT system. This was approx six years ago. Never had them cleaned. No batteries. We've generated approx 3200kwh/year consistently each year we have had them. If we've used even a third or generated power that's approx £250/year saved on current prices but I suspect overall it's more than this, I'd guess closer to £350/year or so. As we have also had the FIT payments on the older scheme that's approx £300ish a year extra, so reckon the savings and FIT payments have paid for ours already.... Obvs the older scheme is more generous but £7k sounds v expensive unless that also includes batteries. Obviously if you had batteries you'd use a lot larger % of generated power so savings would accrued quicker. YMMV, of course.
And of course the other scenario which would help you make the most of solar panels is if you use them to heat your hot water via an immersion, using a device like an iBoost controller. But in my case it's probably one of the best investments I've ever made.
Return is about 10years on a good system Don’t need cleaning - the elements do that sun/ UV , rain and the frost is great at cleaning them In-line for the year ahead. They pay if you are looking to stay in your house for many years. Our electric for a 4 bed house with 7 . 8 kw system, 10kw battery is £400.00 a year and I run a pond 750 watts 365 days a year on top of all electrucal items in the house worth every penny!
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